It's different in that it takes a single, comma delimited string (you cannot specify an option multiple times [that I could tell] with cobra) and parses it into a map[string]string.  The one in flags takes an array of strings and turns it into an EnvironmentDescription, which is array-based.  We can reconcile how to represent envs on the commandline later, but right now this version is needed, though I will move it to flags.